A Too Intimate Look At Self-pity

CHAUNCEY MABE BOOKS EDITOR

March 21, 1999|CHAUNCEY MABE BOOKS EDITOR

Nothing ruins a good book more completely than a narrow focus on self-pity. British author Hanif Kureishi provides a sterling example. His novel Intimacy (Scribner, $16, 118 pp.), is brief, well-crafted and full of precise emotional insights -- and yet the incessant whining of the lead character makes it a chore.

The self-pity here comes in two varieties, well-blended. First is the Baby Boom generation (yes, they have Boomers in England, too), consisting of people who have everything and are petulant at the discovery they are unhappy anyhow.

Second is the pathetic discontent of men who want to leave their wives and children but lack the courage -- and view their irresolution as a moral virtue.

Kureishi's protagonist, Jay, has an easy, well-paying profession as a film scenarist who adapts novels for the screen -- in his own words, turning literature into "pap." He lives with his longtime girlfriend Susan in a comfortable London house with their two small sons. He has a circle of friends.

Smarting to find himself middle-aged, Jay has grown increasingly dissatisfied with Susan; now he has finally decided that the relationship must end. He will leave Susan, with whom he can barely stand to share a room, and, incidentally, his sons, whom he loves.

The action of the novel takes place over the course of a single night as Jay prepares to abandon his family for a less certain, less stultifying life. The narrative is made up of Jay's first-person meditations on the relationship with Susan, his love for Nina (a girlfriend who dumped him when he could not quite bring himself to leave Susan at an earlier juncture), and the damage his departure will do his children.

"It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back," the narrative begins (the same sentence is highlighted on the cover of the book). "Tomorrow morning, when the woman I have lived with for six years has gone to work on her bicycle, and our children have been taken to the park with their ball, I will pack some things into a suitcase, slip out of my house hoping no one will see me, and take the tube to Victor's place."

That wallowing tone continues to the last page, rendering this the longest 118-page novel imaginable. Which is unfortunate, because Kureishi takes care to explore in depth the moral and psychological costs of the choice Jay is making. Without turning her into an ogre, Jay shows how Susan has become impossible. She is prickly, contrary, sexually remote, not given to emotional warmth or support.

"To keep everything going, she can be bullying and strict, with a hard, charmless carapace. You have to take care with her: she will rarely cry, but she could burst into flames."

Yet it is plain that under the burden of daily life, Susan loves Jay, and he suffers with the knowledge of what abandonment will do to her. And he agonizes over the pain his sons will feel, and the loss he himself will suffer when he can no longer share their daily lives.

Like angels sitting on his shoulders, fighting for his soul with whisperings into his ears, Jay's best friends offer conflicting advice. Victor left his family some years ago without regret, though his life today consists of slovenly sexual encounters; Asif is happily married, contentedly yoked to duty. Jay admires them both, for reasons that reflect the contradictory impulses of his own nature.

Kureishi examines Jay's dilemma in sometimes excruciating detail. In the manner of a sensitive fellow given to overthinking, Jay contrasts his own freedom against the restrictions of his father's generation. But after depicting the dehumanizing effects an unhappy marriage had on both his parents, Jay acknowledges that in later life they discovered a new romance of walks, art galleries, movies, holidays: "My parents went through the darkness and discovered a new intimacy."

While such detail, can illuminate, it can also be excessive. It can go beyond the tiresome to the gratuitous and unappetizing, as in a masturbation scene that, while thoroughly authentic, emotionally speaking, just altogether shows more than most readers will want to see, and which goes far beyond the demands of drama.

In the end, Intimacy is one of those novels more to be admired than embraced. While Jay's pain is all too common among middle-aged men, and certainly a suitable subject for a dramatization, it is not sufficient to carry a novel all by itself. Even so short a novel as this. Self-pity is too strong a flavoring for such a small dish.

For example, it would be more palatable if Kureishi had enlarged the scope beyond a single night to take in a broader cross-section of Jay's life. He could have introduced some humor to dilute the pathos. Or, most simply, he could have given the reader a welcome degree of emotional distance by telling the story in the third person.

As an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette), Kureishi ought to have rendered the narrative in a more dramatic, less meditative narrative. It is surprising that he did not.

Chauncey Mabe can be reached at cmabe@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4710.